The present invention relates to the field of cinerary urns and funerary monuments made of cut stone, natural stone or artificial stone.
During certain funeral ceremonies, it is planned to receive the ashes of the deceased in a cinerary urn which, as desired, is sealed or simply capped before being handed over to the survivors for safe keeping. The ashes are generally collected in a metal vase whose cap has to be sealed before it is placed in a cinerary urn of which there is a wide variety of models, especially made of rock or metal.
There are known cylindrical cinerary urns consisting of a hollow pot made of a monolithic stone block. The stone block is turned on a lathe before being hollowed out by means of a main axial coring operation and then secondary coring operations to obtain the bit-by-bit breakage of the ties between the cored portions and the bottom of the monolithic pot while preventing the breakage of the pot itself. The external surface of the pot often has a lathed or sculptured ornamentation.
These monolithic stone urns have the drawback of high cost because of the large number of coring operations, painstaking operations that are lengthy and costly in terms of labor, tooling and wear and tear of the tools.
Cinerary urns are usually kept individually in a niche in a columbarium or separately in a building.
The document FR-2 681 624 describes another stone urn obtained by assembling a tubular stone block with stone disks of the same diameter forming a lid and pedestal, one face of the disk being bonded to the end rim of the block. These urns are designed to be preserved and concealed within a funerary monument slab, the urns being inserted in a cylindrical bore of the slab.
These urns are not assembled together and do not, in themselves, constitute a funerary monument that needs to meet aesthetic criteria. These urns also have the drawback of requiring numerous, delicate machining operations, the document FR-2 681 624 providing for a method of preparation in which a stone slab is cored for the extraction, firstly, of a column in obtaining, furthermore, a funeral slab, with a bore, then a part of this column is truncated to obtain disks while the axial part of the remainder of the column is bored, this column then being truncated to obtain the blocks, and finally the disks are bonded to the ends of the blocks.
The document FR-2 722 229 describes another type of cinerary monument formed by pillars and columns formed by a stack of boxes of cinerary urns with a parallelepiped or even cylindrical shape. Each box has an aperture on a lateral face to introduce the cinerary urn, this single side aperture being closed by a door or a plate, while the lower and upper fixed faces comprise shapes in relief, both recessed and raised, which are designed to enable the boxes to get fitted with each other during the stacking. These bulky boxes with a complex shape also have the drawback of requiring numerous steps of fashioning and joining, and have a prohibitive cost such that a stone structure cannot be envisaged.
In an unexpected way, an object of the invention is the making of modular cinerary urn receptacles that can be stacked in funerary columns in order to obtain a stable, sturdy and compact funerary monument with a simple, dignified, and elegant shape.
Another goal of the invention is to achieve the speedy, reliable and low-cost manufacture of cylindrical urns of this kind out of natural stone.
Briefly, these goals are achieved by providing for a modular cinerary urn receptacle made of natural stone comprising a hollow cylindrical block closed at the upper end by a projecting lid, the lower end including a countersinking bore capable of receiving a closing inner seal and receiving the lid of another receptacle.
The invention defines a cinerary urn receptacle made of stone comprising a cylindrical block hollowed out from a first end to a second end and a lid comprising a sealing portion and an assembling portion, the sealing portion sealing the first end of the block, the assembling portion projecting from said first end when the sealing portion seals the first end, the second end of the block comprising an internal countersinking bore capable of receiving an inner seal and capable of receiving an assembling portion projecting from a lid of another identical receptacle to form a funerary column.
The invention is used by forming a funerary column consisting of modular stone cinerary urn receptacles of this kind stackable onto each other, with the lower most urn receptacle stackable on a column base having a projected end portion that can be fitted into the internal countersinking bore of the second end of the lowermost urn receptacle.
Furthermore, according to the invention, it is planned to implement a method for the manufacture of a cinerary urn receptacle from a column lathed out of natural stone, the method comprising the steps of:
performing a double coring of the column in a single operation to form a hollow block comprising a cylindrical hole crossing from a first end to a second end of the block and a countersinking bore at a second end of the block;
cutting out plates of natural stone by coring with a drill having an internal diameter greater than the diameter of the hole and less than the diameter of the countersinking bore of the block to form an inner seal and/or a lid disk, and
performing a tubular coring operation on tile lid disk with a tubular coring drill having an internal dieter slightly smaller than or equal to the diameter of the hole and an external diameter greater than the diameter of the lid disk to form a lid including a shoulder.